My first ever guided pic ....

[toryglen-boy]

The Lagoon Nebula (just for a change!)

total of around 16 min subs, taken on a Canon 1000d through an Orion ED80, guided on an EQ6 with an ST80 and Orion Sure Shot Autoguider.

any advice gratefully taken



go easy on me !

[Matty P]

Hi Duncan,

Well done on your first guided pic. Looks good to me for only 16 minutes. The only thing that needs changing is that it is way too blue. A quick levels adjustment and you are in business. :)

You may be able to get more nebulosity to show as well. ;) More exposures is best though.

Well done. :thumbsup:

[dugnsuz]

:party:
Cracking start Duncan - welcome aboard m'boy!!!!
Looks like you've sorted that guiding problem out too.

Criticism (constructive, mind!!) - colour balance is very blue as Matt said.
Looks like you've clipped the red channel quite a bit - open PS > Levels, then check out each colour channel individually. You'll notice that the curve of the red channel is shifted way to the left - part of it off the chart. Go back to your original and play around with each colour channel so that each curve is as close to the left as possible without cutting off part of the curve.
Does that make any sense? This is a strange hobby!!!
My homey Ezystyles says it better...(:P)
http://www.ezystyles.com.au/photoshop.html
In Eric's tutorial he's manipulating the complete RGB image in Levels - get your hands dirty a little and pull down that "RGB" menu and play around with each colour channel individually. You'll find you've got much better control of the image that way.

Image is a wee bit noisy too - more exposures and a decent noise reduction PS filter will help.
I use Noise Ninja (downloadable trial available)
http://www.picturecode.com/

Tried to play around with the 195kb image to bring out a little more detail (hope you don't mind) - just tweaking in PS using the above tools. Brought out a bit more detail/colour but a lot more noise too!

All the best
Doug:thumbsup:

[toryglen-boy]

thanks for the comments guys, i knew it was really blue, and i havent had a chance to mess with it yet, although i encourage anyone to have a go with it.

I think i finally cracked drift alignment (with the help of Tempeswhizz from these very boards) and i guided on a bright star, keeping the guiding exposures to 0.5s, to help with accuracy.

The blue is a hangover from the CLS filter, although i have to learn abou tusing PS and making things look better..

but its a start !!

;)

[multiweb]

Awesome! :thumbsup: Now you got the guiding sorted out you need to focus on your field (coma corrector, focus, etc...)

[Omaroo]

Great stuff Duncan. Nice image for your first guiding attempt! :thumbsup: As stated, focus could do with a tweak (do you have a Bahtinov mask handy?) but otherwise colours are pretty easy to fix. Good effort!

[peeb61]

Great effort Duncan.
Keep up the good work.

Paul

[telecasterguru]

Great first guide. You're on your way. Keep posting new images.

Frank

[DavidU]

Good on you Duncan !
You got the alignment sorted. I can't wait to see what you do in the comming months.

[kinetic]

Mate that is more than just a start,
that is very good TGB!

Not only is it a great feeling to produce an early result
as crisp as that, but the words of encouragement from
people of Doug's calibre and others are a real boost too.

Keep them coming.

Steve

[toryglen-boy]

lots of kind words from discerning people !!

many thanks

;)

[White Rabbit]

Nice one duncan. One tip I have for the cls filter (I useone as well) is to correct the colour on the raw images by adjusting the white balance manually.

In the canon photo profesional, double click on an image/right click/tool pallet/ whitebalance tune. Just click on various parts of the pallet to see what corrects the color the best. Works a treat and makes processing much easier on the other end.
Then copy recipe to clipboard, highlight all the subs and paste recipe to highlighted images. this will change the white balance for all the subs.

Sandy

[Hagar]

Great first attempt at guided imaging Duncan. As for your guiding woes, looks like you have sorted them quite well. You need to pay attention to the histogram during the processing. When usig the levels dialog in PS pay attention to the individual colours. It looks like you have clipped the red channel and with this being a predominantly red nebula any clipping removes valuable data from the nebula. Once you click OK this detail is lost for ever. The remaining colours are way out of alignment causing the blue cast to the image.

The image below shows what can be achieved by just aligning the 3 colours using the levels dialog. I also pushed the red out off the stop on the histogram a bit.

This image is a good one for you to do a repro on. You will learn a lot with quite a good capture such as this. It is a fairly steep learning curve to overcome with the black art of processing but this will happen. It is always a lot easier when you have well focused and good guided data and this you seem to have.
Keep at it, it will happen and all will make sense soon enough.

Give it a repro using the same raw data and see how you go.

[Screwdriverone]

NOOOOOOO DUNCAN! COME BACK TO THE LIGHT!!!

Don't cross over to the dark side! You will never return (with your wallet intact)

:lol:

Now, having said all that, for your first go, WHAT A CRACKER!

Yes I know it could be better etc etc, but jeez, thats a corker for a first effort! Well done!

Stars look good to me and overall its a beauty.

I will leave the technical improvements to those better suited to advise you with what to do properly, but to my newbie-never-before-tried-a-DSO-pic-eyes, thats a fantastic start.

Well done :thumbsup:

Cheers

Chris

[Astrobserver99]

Terrific first image Duncan, Well Done!

[Lester]

Wow, for your first image with auto tracking, I am impressed.

Makes me want to get my rig up and going in this direction.

Good on ya.

[jjjnettie]

:D Good onya Duncan, top work.
I dream of of being able to do long exposures.

[dpastern]

Congrats Duncan, glad you've got guiding sorted out. More subs and you'll be ripping into it!

Dave

[RobF]

No stopping you now Duncan. Great first effort!